KX POWERS LARGE-SCALE IN-MEMORY RESEARCH AT SQUAREPOINT CAPITAL

Apr 27, 2017

Kx Systems, a subsidiary of First Derivatives (FD) plc, announces that Squarepoint Capital, a global systematic investment manager, has significantly expanded its use of Kx technology for investment research.

Kdb+ is Kx’s market leading time-series database, which is widely used in the financial services industry for trading and risk management platforms. In the era of Big Fast Data analytics, kdb+ has set industry benchmarks for speed and stability in high performance applications, with these attributes increasingly recognized across a range of markets such as manufacturing and retail which face similarly demanding data challenges.

As faster large-memory servers are becoming standard, investment managers like Squarepoint are designing their systems to capitalize on the extra speed available when analyzing the vast datasets that underpin their investment models. Squarepoint is taking advantage of these large-memory servers to get the best performance on complex analytics with a lower total cost of ownership compared to other technologies on the market.

David Jack, Chief Operating Officer of Squarepoint said: “Our experienced team has used and appreciated kdb+ for some time. We currently have kdb+ on a number of high memory servers and in terms of improving productivity, nothing else comes close. In the past, we have experienced some performance issues with other options, including open source software, so this expansion of kdb+ is a welcome development.”

Mark Sykes, Chief Operating Officer of Kx said: “Squarepoint is a truly nimble firm trading globally across multiple assets. Through the use of our Kx technology they can achieve the scale and performance of large buy-side firms. Its architecture allows them to scale vertically with increased memory and horizontally via an unlimited number of machines and shared file systems. The firm’s forward thinking approach fits perfectly with the Kx technology ethos and represents a great partnership.”